Iain And Will Have A Cup Of TeabyMatt HaynesIain stared glumly at the stained formica. “It’s like I said, when I told you how Hackney’s pre-Games decontamination and realignment into a fugitive cartography of designer lock-ups and guerrilla sofa bars had created a hallucinatory Ballardian nexus of dystopian interzones – some of the ley lines they dug up to build the Basketball Arena had been there since the days of King Lud.” [read more…]

Threnody on the Death of a Street Lamp on Lollard Street, SE11byMatt HaynesO noble lantern ’neath whose kindly firemy love and I did oft together lark,our bodies, lust-engorged, ’twined in desire –why hast thou gone and left us in the dark?[read more…]

For The Greater GoodbyMatt HaynesMother, by the time you read this I will be in Tegucigalpa.Don’t worry, I’ll be fine; I just wanted to let you knowThat I have buried the body of Nigel FarageAt the back of Uncle Terry’s garageIn Bow. [read more…]

Leyton LightsbyMatt HaynesOnce, on a night flight to Los Angeles, our pilot told us over the intercom that if we looked out the right-hand window we’d see Las Vegas. So I pressed my face to the Plexiglas and saw a strip of pure light blazing out from the Nevada desert like someone had just skimmed sodium pebbles across a vast black lake. [read more…]

byMatt HaynesHedonism, of course, was the name of the game, and pretty much anything went. One night, Boy George nearly brought Duran Duran’s career to a premature end when, clutching a garish mojito, he hurtled down the slope using Simon le Bon as a toboggan; luckily for the course of popular music, the chubby Brummie took it in his pantalooned stride. [read more…]

JACOBVS SECVNDVS, Trafalgar Square by Matt HaynesDon’t be fooled by the Roman garb. This effete nob with his toga tossed casually over his shoulder – part Brideshead, part Duran Duran circa Planet Earth – and his tunic hoicked over his knee like a Year 11 schoolgirl at a bus stop in Watford is, in fact, King James II, his body languidly bowed like a small fey banana and his upper limbs polygonically disposed as if to remind us that, truly, this was the noblest teapot of them all. [read more…]